Astral Weeks - Recording Sessions

Recording Sessions

With his legal matters resolved, Morrison now had the freedom to proceed with recording his Warner Bros. debut album, with the recording sessions taking place at the Century Sound Studios in New York on 25 September 1 and 15 October 1968.

Recording adjacent to Van Morrison's studio, musician John Cale reported, "Morrison couldn't work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes." This is, in fact, completely untrue – the live tracks for the sessions were performed by Morrison on vocals and acoustic guitar in a separate vocal booth with the other musicians playing together on upright bass, lead acoustic guitar, vibes, flute, and drums. The strings and horns constituted the only instruments added subsequently to the initial recording sessions.

Producer Lewis Merenstein had a background in jazz, and according to Merenstein, Morrison "was not an aficionado of jazz when I met him. R&B and soul, yes; but jazz, no." For the Astral Weeks recording sessions, Merenstein first contacted veteran bassist Richard Davis. Perhaps best known for his work with Eric Dolphy, Davis essentially served as the session leader, and it was through Davis that Merenstein recruited guitarist Jay Berliner, percussionist Warren Smith, Jr., and drummer Connie Kay. All of these musicians had strong backgrounds in jazz; Berliner had worked closely with Charles Mingus and Kay was part of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Morrison was still working with Kielbania and Payne, but for these sessions, they were essentially replaced. According to Kielbania, "I got to show all the bass lines to Richard Davis. He embellished a lot of them, but I gave him the feeling."

Davis proved, perhaps, to be the most pivotal instrumentalist during these sessions. "If you listen to the album, every tune is led by Richard and everybody followed Richard and Van's voice," says Merenstein. "I knew if I brought Richard in, he would put the bottom on to support what Van wanted to do vocally, or acoustically. Then you get Jay playing those beautiful counter-lines to Van." Davis was not impressed by Morrison, but not out of disdain or any preconceived notions, but rather because Morrison's professional comportment generally did not meet Davis's expectations. "No prep, no meeting," recalls Davis. "He was remote from us, 'cause he came in and went into a booth... And that's where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don't think he ever introduced himself to us, nor we to him... And he seemed very shy..." Drummer Connie Kay later told Rolling Stone that he approached Morrison and asked "what he wanted me to play, and he said to play whatever I felt like playing. We more or less sat there and jammed." Morrison's impression of the sessions was "The songs came together very well in the studio. Some of the tracks were first takes. the musicians were really together. Those type of guys play what you're gonna do before you do it, that's how good they are." He told Ritchie Yorke that only two tracks recorded during the sessions did not make it to the album. "One was about Jesse James and the other about trains. They were both just basic blues numbers. That's why they didn't fit in with the album."

"You have to understand something,...A lot of this ... there was no choice. I was totally broke. So I didn't have time to sit around pondering or thinking all this through. It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do."

For the Astral Weeks sessions, apparently they did not employ any lead sheets, or at least none were distributed to the musicians. "What stood out in my mind was the fact that he allowed us to stretch out," recalls Berliner. "We were used to playing to charts, but Van just played us the songs on his guitar and then told us to go ahead and play exactly what he felt." Berliner actually had great appreciation for the freedom given to him and the band; something few, if any, of them were used to. "I played a lot of classical guitar on those sessions and it was very unusual to play classical guitar in that context," says Berliner.

The first session, held in the evening on 25 September 1968, produced four recordings that made it to the album. Only three had initially been intended for inclusion: "Cyprus Avenue", "Madame George," and "Beside You". Although not scheduled to play, Payne still attended the first session and listened as another flautist played his parts. To this day, nobody recalls the name of this flautist, nor has he been identified on any of the surviving documentation; he does play flute on the released takes of "Beside You" and "Cyprus Avenue" but is not included in the album credits. When Morrison tried to squeeze in one last tune during the end of that first session, Payne spoke up and pleaded to Merenstein to permit him to participate. Payne was then allowed to play on what became the title track of the album – "Astral Weeks" – the fourth song produced from this initial session. For the remainder of the sessions, John Payne played on every song.

The next session, according to John Payne, occurred early in the morning, but it did not work and nothing from this session worked for the final album. "It just didn't happen'" says Payne. "It was the wrong time of day for jazz musicians to create. I think that by the end of that session we all knew that nothing was going to be used. They just said, let's forget it." Jay Berliner was not available, so Barry Kornfeld was recruited to play lead guitar in his place. According to Merenstein, there was tension at this second session and it was stopped after about three hours. Morrison was quoted by Ritchie Yorke as saying the album was recorded in "two eight-hour sessions, plus two overdub sessions. That was the whole album." In his biography, Clinton Heylin gives the date for the second session as 1 October and states that "Only 'As Young Lovers Do' from this session would make the album" contending that this is the reason for the different "lounge-jazz sound" on this track. Other biographers have primarily noted that the early morning first of October session was abandoned without producing any of the songs on the album.

The third and final session, in the evening on 15 October, produced four more recordings that completed the album — "The Way Young Lovers Do" "Sweet Thing", "Ballerina" and "Slim Slow Slider". Davis expressed to Rolling Stone that there was a "certain feel about a seven-to-ten o' clock session" and that "the ambience of that time of day was all through everything we played". Both "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina" were originally scheduled for the session, but the search for a 'closer' consumed a considerable amount of time. They attempted (and rejected) a number of songs until Morrison suggested "Slim Slow Slider". "I don't think we'd ever done live," recalls Payne. " had a book full of songs... I don't know why he decided to do it...And we were first doing it with the drums, with Richard Davis and Connie Kay and the guitar player and the vibe player and me and Van — all of us were playing. Then I started playing soprano sax on the thing, and Lew said, 'OK, I wanna try it again. Start again. And I want just the bass, the soprano sax, and Van.'" It was a successful take, but it also came with a very long coda, prompting Merenstein to make a large cut during the editing process. Many of the tracks on Astral Weeks would be subjected to edits (mainly to tighten the performances), but the one on "Slim Slow Slider" was easily the most substantial. "I would estimate three, five minutes of instrumental stuff," says Payne. "We went through stages we got to be avant-garde kind of weird, which is what you hear after the splice- all that weird stuff we're playing — but there was a whole progression to that." According to Merenstein, before he cut it, the coda "was a long, long ending that went nowhere, that just carried on from minute to minute...If it had relativity to the tune itself, I would have left it there."

The recording engineer for the album, Brooks Arthur, remembered the sessions in 2009: "A cloud came along, and it was called the Van Morrison sessions. We all hopped upon that cloud, and the cloud took us away for awhile, and we made this album, and we landed when it was done." In a Rolling Stone interview in 1972, Morrison told John Grissim, Jr.: "I was really pretty happy with the album. The only complaint I had was that it was rather rushed. But I thought it was closer to the type of music I wanted to put out. And still is, actually."